- Extreme climate events increase risk of global food insecurity and adaptation needs. Factoring in climate variability shows that just considering the change in the average climate underestimates the food security hit.
- Increases in extreme heat stress in domesticated livestock species during the twenty-first century. And the hit is already landing.
- Data-driven decentralized breeding increases prediction accuracy in a challenging crop production environment. What we therefore need is 3-D breeding.
- Novel Sources of Pre-Harvest Sprouting Resistance for Japonica Rice Improvement. Including for resistance to pre-harvest sprouting in rice due to unexpected typhoons.
- The genome of stress tolerant crop wild relative Paspalum vaginatum leads to increased biomass productivity in the crop Zea mays. For sure crop wild relatives are going to help.
- Megabase-scale presence-absence variation with Tripsacum origin was under selection during maize domestication and adaptation. If they haven’t helped already.
- Registration of three peanut allotetraploid interspecific hybrids resistant to late leaf spot disease and tomato spotted wilt. Sometimes you need multiple CWR.
- Collection, genotyping and virus elimination of cassava landraces from Tanzania and documentation of farmer knowledge. But landraces too will come in handy, especially if farmers’ knowledge is properly documented.
- Prioritizing host phenotype to understand microbiome heritability in plants. And don’t forget the microbiome.
- Economic analysis of habitat manipulation in Brassica pest management: Wild plant species suppress cabbage webworm. Not to mention the ecosystem as a whole.
- Relevance of hop terroir for beer flavour. Oh hell, I give up, time for a craft beer.
- On the Trail of the German Purity Law: Distinguishing the Metabolic Signatures of Wheat, Corn and Rice in Beer. Maybe even a weissbier.
Nibbles: Eat This Newsletter, Basmati, DSI, NBPGR collecting, Ganja page
- Jeremy’s latest newsletter covers in more depth things we just Nibbled here, including perry and ancient bananas, plus much other stuff. We talked about “wild rice” here a couple of times.
- As for actual rice, the controversy between India and Pakistan about the origin of Basmati just got a bit more complicated. Could it in fact have come from Afghanistan?
- Maybe everyone should listen to Dr Amber Scholz’s ideas about ABS.
- Meanwhile, India’s National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources regional centre in Kumaon has been busy collecting germplasm. No word on whether that includes rice, Basmati or otherwise.
- Pretty cool way of presenting accession data, courtesy of Mystery Haze. I wonder where that’s from originally.
Double de-coupling ABS
Dr Amber Hartman Scholz gave the latest GROW Webinar last week, and her talk and PowerPoint are now online: “Digital Sequence Information: A Looming Disaster or Hidden Opportunity for Positive Change?”
Dr Scholz has been working on the project Wissenschaftliche Lösungsansätze für Digitale Sequenzinformation (Scientific approaches for digital sequence information), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, about which we have blogged before. If you’re interested in biodiversity access and benefit sharing (ABS), and in particular what to do about digital sequence information (DSI), it’s well worth listening to the presentation and Q&A as a whole.
But here’s a spoiler: Dr Scholz is optimistic that there may be a way forward in what she calls “de-coupling.” That is, not tying benefit sharing to access to a particular bit of DSI, but rather designing a system whereby fee-paying membership of a club allows access to all DSI.
That sounds like the subscription system that the Plant Treaty has been considering for a while. So Dr Scholz is really suggesting a double de-coupling, because her idea would also de-couple ABS on the physical material from ABS on DIS, resulting in two parallel but connected multilateral systems.
Thoughts?
Nibbles: Missouri wine, Ancient Chinese beer, UNFSS, Biodiversity & agriculture & diets, Container genebank
- Missouri has been important to wine. Very important.
- And China to beer.
- 7 things that are important for future food systems. Spoiler alert: diversity underpins all 7.
- Why biodiversity is important to diets. And vice versa.
- Why biodiversity is important to agriculture. And vice versa.
- No worries, now anyone can have a genebank.
The Economist on investing in adapting agriculture
A much wider range of adaptations will be needed if food is to remain as copious, varied and affordable as it is today. These will include efforts to help crops withstand warmer temperatures, for example through clever crop breeding, advances in irrigation and protection against severe weather. Rich and poor countries alike should also make it a priority to reduce the amount of food that is wasted (the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation guesses that more than one-third is squandered). The alternative will be a world that is hungrier and more unequal than it is at present—and than it might have been.
That’s from The Economist‘s analysis last week of projected shifts in the distribution of crops around the world as a result of climate change. Needless to say, genetic diversity will be needed to do all those good things. Investors read The Economist, right?